ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Estrogens has traditionally been known as the female hormone, but this idea has been challenged in early 1990’s and an essential physiological role for estrogen in male fertility was identified. Phytoestrogens are naturally occurring non-steroidal plant chemicals that can act like the female hormone estrogen. The herbs ( anise alfalfa and vervain ) chosen in this study contain phytoestrogens. OBJECTIVE: Previous studies demonstrated controversy of the effects of phytoestrogens on the rat testes .Hence, the present investigation was undertaken to investigate the influence of typical dose of herbs containing phytoestrogen on the rat testis. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty-four apparently normal mature male rats were divided into four groups of 6 animals each. The first "control" group received only 4ml of distilled water as a placebo. The second group received 40mg/kg of anise seed; the third group received 53.3 mg/kg of dried herb of vervain and the fourth group received 400 mg /kg of alfalfa seeds. All experimental groups received the doses through orogastric tube daily for fourteen days. Testicular histology was evaluated by light and enzyme histochemistry. Plasma FSH and testosterone concentrations were taken to support our results. RESULTS: Histological examination of anise, alfalfa and vervain – treated groups showed an increase in the height of germinal epithelia. There was marked lipoprotein lipase activity in the whole of the interstitial tissue which is more in amount in experimental groups than that in control group. Acid phosphatase granules were infiltered the seminiferous epithelia mildly in control group , moderately in anise and vervain groups and markedly in alfalfa group. The number of interstitial cells showing marked acid phosphatase activity was higher in all experimental groups than that in control group. Alkaline phosphatase exhibited intense activity in the boundary tissue of the seminiferous tubules in testes of control and experimental groups but it appeared thicker in the latter. CONCLUSION: The low dose and short duration of treatment used in our study made these phytoestrogen – containing herbs to have a stimulatory effect on leydig cell steroidogenesis. This study also demonstrated that aniseed being the most potent of the three herbs followed by alfalfa in stimulating testosterone synthesis. This is possibly attributed to the coumarin constituent of aniseed and alfalfa. KEY WORDS: phytoestrogen-containing herbs, testis, acid phosphatase, alkaline phosphatase, lipoprotein lipase
In this work a chemical sensor was built by using Plane Wave Expansion (PWE) modeling technique by filling the core of 1550 hollow core photonic crystal fiber with chloroform that has different concentrations after being diluted with distilled water. The minimum photonic bandgap width is.0003 and .0005 rad/sec with 19 and 7 cells respectively and a concentration of chloroform that filled these two fibers is 75%.
... Show MoreImproving speaking skills of Iraqi EFL students was the main purpose of the current research. Thirty EFL students were selected as the research participants for achieving this aim. All students completed the pretest and then spent the next 25 weeks meeting for 90 minutes each to present their nine lectures, answer difficult questions, and get feedback on their use of language in context. Progressive-tests, posttests and delayed post-tests followed every three courses. The researcher utilized SPSS 22 to anal Analyze the data descriptively and inferentially after doing an ANOVA on repeated measurements. It has been shown that using the ideas of sociocultural theory in the classroom has an important and positive impact on students of
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Pneumatic processes sequence (PPS) is used widely in industrial applications. It is common to do a predetermined PPS to achieve a specific larger task within the industrial application like the PPS achieved by the pick and place industrial robot arm. This sequence may require change depending on changing the required task and usually this requires the programmer intervention to change the sequence’ sprogram, which is costly and may take long time. In this research a PLC-based PPS control system is designed and implemented, in which the PPS is programmed by demonstration. The PPS could be changed by demonstrating the new required sequence via the user by following simple series of manual steps without h
... Show MoreThis study proposed a biometric-based digital signature scheme proposed for facial recognition. The scheme is designed and built to verify the person’s identity during a registration process and retrieve their public and private keys stored in the database. The RSA algorithm has been used as asymmetric encryption method to encrypt hashes generated for digital documents. It uses the hash function (SHA-256) to generate digital signatures. In this study, local binary patterns histograms (LBPH) were used for facial recognition. The facial recognition method was evaluated on ORL faces retrieved from the database of Cambridge University. From the analysis, the LBPH algorithm achieved 97.5% accuracy; the real-time testing was done on thirty subj
... Show More<span lang="EN-US">The use of bio-signals analysis in human-robot interaction is rapidly increasing. There is an urgent demand for it in various applications, including health care, rehabilitation, research, technology, and manufacturing. Despite several state-of-the-art bio-signals analyses in human-robot interaction (HRI) research, it is unclear which one is the best. In this paper, the following topics will be discussed: robotic systems should be given priority in the rehabilitation and aid of amputees and disabled people; second, domains of feature extraction approaches now in use, which are divided into three main sections (time, frequency, and time-frequency). The various domains will be discussed, then a discussion of e
... Show MoreTo assess cultural competence among nursing students from nine countries to provide an international perspective on cultural competence.
A descriptive, cross‐sectional design.
A convenience sample of 2,163 nursing students from nine countries was surveyed using the Cultural Capacity Scale from April to November 2016.
The study found a moderate range of cultural competence among the students. The ability to teach and guide other nursing colleagues to displ
Soils that cause effective damages to engineer structures (such as pavement and foundation) are called problematic or difficult soils (include collapsible soil, expansive soil, etc.). These damages occur due to poor or unfavorited engineering properties, such as low shear strength, high compressibility, high volume changes, etc. In the case of expansive soil, the problem of the shrink-swell phenomenon, when the soil reacts with water, is more pronounced. To overcome such problems, soils can be treated or stabilized with many stabilization ways (mechanical, chemical, etc.). Such ways can amend the unfavorited soil properties. In this review, the pozzolanic materials have been selected to be presented and discussed as chem
... Show MoreRecent years have seen an explosion in graph data from a variety of scientific, social and technological fields. From these fields, emotion recognition is an interesting research area because it finds many applications in real life such as in effective social robotics to increase the interactivity of the robot with human, driver safety during driving, pain monitoring during surgery etc. A novel facial emotion recognition based on graph mining has been proposed in this paper to make a paradigm shift in the way of representing the face region, where the face region is represented as a graph of nodes and edges and the gSpan frequent sub-graphs mining algorithm is used to find the frequent sub-structures in the graph database of each emotion. T
... Show MoreRobots have become an essential part of modern industries in welding departments to increase the accuracy and rate of production. The intelligent detection of welding line edges to start the weld in a proper position is very important. This work introduces a new approach using image processing to detect welding lines by tracking the edges of plates according to the required speed by three degrees of a freedom robotic arm. The two different algorithms achieved in the developed approach are the edge detection and top-hat transformation. An adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system ANFIS was used to choose the best forward and inverse kinematics of the robot. MIG welding at the end-effector was applied as a tool in this system, and the wel
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